Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity
“Nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net.”
In the face of the nihilisms of our contemporary culture, this is a welcoming word that signals an openness to God and to his will and way for our humanity. It should and is meant to complement the opening line of the Epistle reading, “be ye all of one mind,” but it doesn’t, at least not now in our situation as a church. We aren’t of one mind on many matters of great importance. We are a church divided, and a community and culture of souls divided. This is, sadly, nothing new. I have offered a brief statement of reflection about the current state of disarray, disaffection, and division with respect to the issue of same-sex marriage. The institutional church remains caught in the controversies of identity in our contemporary culture. We live in a divided church but prayerfully and, I hope, charitably with respect to these divisions and with an openness to the rediscovery of the principles that provide a more complete understanding of our humanity.
Today’s Gospel grounds our lives not on self-assertion but upon God’s word. Ambrose, in his commentary on this passage, indicates that in the figure of Peter especially, we have the figure of the Church. Peter is the rock upon which Christ builds the Church but only “at thy word.” It is a powerful idea and concept. There is the constant struggle to understand what it means to act in accord with God’s Word but, at the very least, it acts as a check upon human presumption. Simon Peter expresses very clearly the nature of the human predicament. “We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” This complements wonderfully Mary’s statement to Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee that “they” – we – “have no wine.” The awareness of our limitations, of our mortality, of our insufficiency, of our confusion, is a profound truth about our humanity. In our current distresses, it suggests at the very least uncertainties about ourselves and about the claims of the autonomous self. To put it in another way, what these Gospel stories indicate is that God knows us better than we know ourselves, on the one hand, and that God seeks for us to know what he seeks for us, on the other hand. “We see in a glass darkly,” not least of all about ourselves. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known,” as Paul says, known in Christ. Hence the significance of the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ. Divine love transforms and perfects our human loves in all our confusions and illusions but only “at thy word.”
